Indie Game of the Week 424: Tiny Room Stories: Town Mystery

Full disclosure, I was going to look at the viscerally perturbing Mouthwashing this week but, seeing as I'm about to undergo some unpleasant and invasive dental surgery of my own after the weekend and that title suggests it might hit a bit close to home, I've decided to assuage my anxious heart (i.e. chicken out) with a nice, chill game about solving little diorama puzzles. Tiny Room Stories: Town Mystery (presumably there's a series planned with more Tiny Rooms in places that aren't towns; maybe cities?!) is a relatively no-frills, low-budget Escape Room type of adventure game series where most of the gameplay, at least early into a new instance, involves opening all the drawers and cupboards and purloining everything of value. Usually keys and crowbars, both offering a similar utility for getting into new places. Its story involves the mysterious (ah, like in the title) absence of people in the town of Redcliff (I've yet to determine if this place has any relation to the Three Kingdoms, but I suspect not). After some investigating at your father's place, who sent you the message to come investigate the town's shady side, you eventually discover that the town's elite found some strange crystal underground and after some experiments everything's turned vaguely Silent Hill-ish, just without the hostile psychosexual manifestations skulking around. Well, so far at least.

I said it was an Escape Room game and that's something specific to the type of adventure game puzzles it offers, in that each chapter is its own self-contained thing where you're ultimately there to find the next breadcrumb along the trail (and thus the next location) but will spend anywhere up to an hour solving various little puzzles in these locations in a vaguely linear sequence before you eventually find what you're looking for. Though there's certainly issues with some aspects of the presentation, particularly the script, the actual mechanics of its puzzle-solving are pretty slick and well-considered. A typical puzzle might have you referring to a document of hints that you took with you—not all clues are as portable, however—and then once that puzzle is solved, the protagonist leaves those documents behind so they're not cluttering up your UI. That's obviously true for the items you might add to your inventory as well; though I'm always a little indignant about him leaving crowbars behind given how much they factor into almost every puzzle. Would it hurt to just hold onto one? Also relevant is the game's presentation, which depicts all its locations as three-dimensional isometric spaces where moving the camera around to see all four walls is often integral to finding all the necessary details.

For a 3D game to work with what I can only assume is a small budget, the whole game's been given a clean lo-poly look to it similar to those Eidos "Go" games developed for mobile (as was this game somewhat, though I believe it came to Steam first) like Lara Croft Go or Hitman Go. The interface, owing to that mobile background, is similarly straightforward though the isometry can occasionally create ambiguity problems if you're trying to access an exit and there's something in the way that your character decides he needs to go stare at up close instead of leaving. Most of the time, though, the exits to an area appear even when you're not facing them with little obvious markers on the floors or walls. There are a few cases where the game could use a map with how big the locations get, but none of its regions are ever excessively large and mazes do factor into a few of the puzzles so I can appreciate the decision to leave that convenience out. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been forced to memorize something more elaborate than a six-digit number so while it might not be a bad idea to have a pen and pad handy it's not a requisite like it can be in other games of its type. (Too bad there aren't many of these puzzle-adventure games taking after the structurally similar Forever Lost series which, despite its flaws, did have the inspired move of giving your hero a Polaroid camera so they could snap shots of any wall art that seemed like it might point to a solution.)

Where Tiny Room Stories does fall down is in its localization, which is spotty at best. Often not an issue if it's just pithy comments from the hero about some inessential background object or some chapter-interstitial "what's happened so far" exposition but there'll be cases where they might be riddles or hints that you'll need to understand in order to progress and a lack of proper English comprehension makes them fairly useless in those contexts. I hate to harp on ESL (the developers are Russian) because our dumbass language isn't the easiest thing to master, as I'm sure any review of mine will be quick to demonstrate, but there are cases where a developer might feel the need to get a professional to look over everything when a legible script is that much more paramount to the genre your game embodies. Beyond that, some minor UI issues, and a sudden leap in difficulty around the start of the third act (which honestly isn't too bad, since it's been kinda easy so far), there's not much griping I can offer towards this game, which does what it does with a certain degree of measured efficiency if not a whole lot of fancy panache. If you're the kind of old schooler who struggled through those super early Japanese-only Flash Escape Room games found on Newgrounds and elsewhere, the language issues probably won't even factor here and its gameplay will otherwise be right up your alley (as would be the case for more recent converts to this type of puzzle game, such as those drawn in by the sci-fi anime melodrama of the Zero Escape series or the more recent multiplayer-friendly Escape Academy).

Overall this is the sort of game that deals in microdoses of dopamine as you solve each of its little puzzles in sequence and finally have what you need to move onto the next environment, ideally just a few moments before you're thoroughly sick of exploring the current one. Though it nominally claims to focus on "tiny rooms" there's a whole lot of areas that appear to qualify: homes, large outdoor areas, museums, banks, warehouses, laboratories, underground ruins, and many others. I've just entered chapter 13 (from what I gather from the achievements, I think there's two more after this) and while I am slowing down due to the incremental puzzle difficulty increases it's still that right mix of obtuse and straightforward where I'm not getting blindsided by something I couldn't have been able to figure out, while still hitting the occasional roadblock until I've taken stock of everything in the vicinity and reconsidered the clues I've been afforded. That the game has this self-contained approach to its chapters does make the latter aspect an easier task to juggle and is definitely key to the game's great sense of pacing. There's parts I'd fix if I had my druthers but Tiny Room Stories has been some solid puzzling so far; it sounds like their next one, Tiny Room Stories: Rift Escape, is going to be on its way soon enough too so I might have to add that to the ol' ungovernable Steam wishlist.

Rating: 4 out of 5.